Again this week, potential profitability came down to the final wagers of the round, and again those wagers were sufficiently successful to produce a net profit, slender though it was.

Actually, it was about as slender as it could possibly be without shrinking into non-existence: Investors made a little under 9-hundredths of a cent for the week. Rounded, we'll call that a gain of 0.1c, which leaves the Recommended Portfolio now down by just 2.3c on the season.

The entirety of the week's profit is attributable to the efforts of the Line Fund, whose 2 from 3 performance added 4c to its value and 2.4c to the value of the Recommended Portfolio, offsetting the 0 from 1 performance of the Head-to-Head Fund, and the 0 from 10 performance of the Margin Fund. It's hard to be too critical of the Margin Fund's performance, however, as it did finish within a handful of points of collects in a couple of games during the round.

TIPSTERS AND PREDICTORS

Eight of nine favourites won this week so, yet again, most Head-to-Head Tipsters recorded near-perfect results and none of the uncertainty at the top of the MAFL Leaderboard was resolved. Combo_NN2 still leads by one tip from the three ProPred Tipsters.

Six of the winners, including the lone underdog victor, were home teams, which was good news for Home Sweet Home, lifting its all-season performance above 55% for the first time in a while.

Not even the Swans' 129-point blowout victory over the Giants was enough to seriously dent the mean absolute prediction errors (MAPEs) recorded by the Margin Predictors this week. In fact, the top 5 Predictors all secured sub-20 MAPEs, which left them all with season-long MAPEs under 26.5 points per game. At this point, 2013 is looking like the most predictable season in MAFL history.

As the following chart shows, the week's relative predictability left the top 10 Predictors in exactly the same order as they were at the end of the previous round.

What this chart also shows is just how dominant the two RSMP-based predictors have been since Round 5 when the two assumed the top two rankings, a situation that's been unchanged since then albeit that RSMP Weighted wrested top spot from RSMP Simple in Round 8.

RSMP Weighted and RSMP Simple also remain as the Margin Predictors with the best line betting performances, each having selected the correct line winner at least 57% of the time.

Amongst the Head-to-Head Probability Predictors, Bookie_LPSO continues to lead all-comers after yet another week of across-the-board strongly positive probability scores. Looking just at the results for this week, Bookie_LPSO was the best-performed of all the Predictors, though the two other TAB Bookmaker-derived Predictors and WinPred weren't far astern.

Even the Line Fund algorithm enjoyed a strongly positive week of probability scoring, recording its best single-round score this season.

SUPERMARGIN PERFORMANCES

It was easy enough this week to get close to the correct victory margin, but not as easy to select the correct bucket. At least that's what the Margin Predictors found, with only RSMP_Simple managing to select the correct bucket twice.

Bookie_3 had an extraordinary round of near-misses, never once selecting the correct bucket while being in error by a single bucket in six of the round's nine games.